What’s the Best Portable Thunderbolt (Lightspeed) Hard Drive?

The Bufffalo Ministation Thunderbolt Thunderbolt / USB 3.0. It’s not a difficult decision, since this is one of only two bus-powered Thunderbolt (aka Lightspeed) drive available under $200 (the other being the LaCie USB3.0 (thunderbolt series)). It also has USB 3.0, comes with both a USB and Thunderbolt cables (very rare), is solidly-built and well-designed. The base of the drive is essentially a very nice aluminum “cup”, and the top is a thick, durable white plastic. There’s really nothing not to like. If you need Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 for the cross-platform support it delivers, this is pretty much it in the mobile space. There is no power adapter, and the dive powered via USB and Thunderbolt on every computer we tried, including Macs running Windows Server 2008 – though we did have to cheat a bit by using a LaCie Thunderbolt driver to achieve that, as Buffalo has no TB driver for Windows at this time.

The great news is, it’s also a very strong-performing drive.

We saw consistent 100MB/s speeds over Thunderbolt.

and a solid 77MB/s under USB 3.0.

Some of you may be wondering, if Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 are so fast, why aren’t the speeds higher? The answer is the hard drive. These are very good speeds for a 2.5″ standard hard drive, and it simply can’t come near filling the bandwidth pipe available on TB or USB 3.0 (just as it can’t fill a SATA 2 or 3 channel). Naturally, we wanted to see how fast the Buffalo could go, so we opened it up and put a fast SSD in there. The Sandisk Extreme SSD we used has posted 400MB/s in these tests when connected to SATA3 internally, so how could it do in the Buffalo enclosure? Very well, it turns out.

Sandisk Extreme SSD connected via Thunderbolt

We saw 354MB/s over Thunderbolt

The best USB3 can offer

and 237MB/s over USB 3.0.

While Thunderbolt has twice the bandwidth of USB 3.0, both of these interfaces are theoretically capable of delivering speeds faster than even the 400MB/s speed the Sandisk delivers via SATA3. If you’re wondering why they both failed to deliver native speeds, this earlier post explains that. That said, 354MB/s and 237MB/s for TB and USB 3.0 is really very commendable for a single disk, and it’s clear Buffalo’s done an excellent job. An SSD version is currently available in Japan, though the US market is only offered 500GB and 1TB conventional disks for now. Is it worth it? With a conventional hard drive, we would say probably not. You certainty aren’t going to see speeds significantly faster than USB 3.0 can offer more cheaply. If you’re planning on installing an SSD, however, our testing shows it’s unquestionably worth the premium. But those are questions that ultimately can only be answered by you, the user. For our part, we were extremely impressed with what Buffalo’s done here, and we have no reservations recommending this as the best bus-powered solution on the market at this time.

Want that kind of SSD over thunderbolt speed, but don’t want to make that modification yourself? Check out the slightly slower, and unquestionably clunkier Lacie. If you’re ok with the design and much bulkier package, it’s also a solid choice.